Sorry, bullies often make the best leaders

While on one of her famous royal tours, the great Queen Elizabeth I was staying at a country house and preparing to come downstairs to be presented to the multitude.

Before she was quite ready - she wasn't exactly undressed, but nor was she in her full finery - she happened to be standing at a window, and a harmless young man outside could not stop gawping at her. Blimey - it was the Queen at the window!

He was not prepared for what happened next. Furious at what she deemed to be his impertinence in looking at her when she was 'unready', Elizabeth stormed downstairs and walloped him.

Can Gordon Brown take comfort from the story? Elizabeth was arguably the greatest ruler this country has ever had. It could be said that she invented England as a nation.

But then she was lucky enough to live before Christine Pratt set up her National Bullying Helpline on an industrial estate in Swindon.

Queen Elizabeth regularly flew into rages with servants, underlings, ambassadors - anyone who got in her way. On one occasion, when a poor serving woman was clumsy in dishing out the Queen's food, Elizabeth stabbed her in the hand.

'When she smiled, it was pure sunshine, that every one did choose to bask in, if they could,' wrote her godson, Sir John Harington, 'but anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds, and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike.'

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The Prime Minister's notoriously short fuse has now become a matter of great public concern. The Conservatives have fatuously called for a 'public inquiry' about it - as though any inquiry could tell us more than the newspapers have already revealed about Gordon's bad behaviour.

Of course, no one can approve of bullying. But I cannot help feeling that there is a good deal of opportunistic humbug in the howls of protest which these stories have occasioned.

Anger: Elizabeth I and Winston Churchill are both known to have had a tendency to irascibility as a result of their pressurised positions

After all, 10 Downing Street is no stranger to shouting, temper tantrums and downtrodden staff.

The fact is that many great leaders have had a tendency to irascibility. They are performing a high-wire act on our behalf and, of course, they live on their nerves.

It is not as if they are some middle manager from Tesco bawling at the shelf stackers.

When Churchill took over as Prime Minister in 1940, the staff at Downing Street loathed him.

He was habitually rude. He kept extraordinary hours. He was usually half-drunk - unlike Gordon Brown, who has eschewed the diet of whisky, champagne and claret that Winston favoured each day for baskets of bananas.

Things got so bad that his wife, Clementine, wrote him a letter in which she told him he simply must behave himself.

But although he was big enough to take this criticism from his beloved Clemmie, Churchill did not change his ways.

Fiery: Margaret Thatcher loved bawling out colleagues while Harold Wilson believed there were conspiracy theories against him

He drove his staff as hard as he drove himself, once telling a flagging secretary after hours of dictation: 'We must go on like gun-horses, till we drop.'

Major Desmond Morton, Churchill's chief advisor on Intelligence, compared his tyrannical style to the bloodiest of Roman emperors, saying: 'Winston would have been a Caligula or worse.'

Winston's successor, Anthony Eden, was just as alarming. He took Benzedrine to keep awake during crises and consequently suffered terrifying mood swings.

In Downing Street during the Suez Crisis of 1956, when his wife, Clarissa, famously felt that the 'Suez Canal was flowing through our drawing room', he would react hysterically to Press criticism of his conduct, screaming with rage and throwing objects around, just as Gordon Brown does today.

The memoirs of close aides and associates tell us of Harold Wilson's furious belief in conspiracy theories against him, and of Heath's megatantrums.

And when Margaret Thatcher became PM, she loved bawling out colleagues, preferably if there was an audience.

U.S. President Lyndon B Johnson tried to get into bed with his secretary

The civil servants were all, as Alan Clark revealed in his ever-readable diaries, 'terrified of the Lady'.

Margaret Thatcher was not in the true sense a bully. Unlike Gordon Brown, who manhandled secretaries out of his way, she reserved her fire for those who - if they had any spunk - were in a position to fight back.

She was punctiliously polite and thoughtful to secretaries, administrative staff, drivers and the like. But she could be angry enough to inspire terror in those who worked for her.

Being Prime Minister - particularly today, when Britain faces such seemingly insurmountable problems - is a uniquely important and pressurised job.

Bearing this in mind, it is surely rather pathetic of people who work in the hothouse of No.10 to phone bullying helplines.

But just as pathetic are those other politicians affecting 'concern' in an orchestrated campaign over Gordon Brown's supposed maltreatment of secretaries and civil servants.

By all means, if you will, say that he has been a lousy Prime Minister. But Brown's bad temper is not a reason for discrediting him - any more than his having the sight of only one eye, or his having a Scottish accent.

The truth is that if you have it in you to be a political leader, you will have passions on a monster scale.

With some great statesmen and women - Catherine the Great of Russia, Lloyd George or John F. Kennedy - these passions will be accompanied by insatiable sexual energy.

(The corrupt, lying, foul-mouthed Texan Lyndon B Johnson, who succeeded JFK as U.S. President in 1963, startled one secretary asleep in her bed with the words: 'Move over, honey, your President needs you.')

With others, the hyper-energy needed to be a leader will take the patient in other directions.

Tony Blair - now so utterly discredited because of his war policies in Iraq - was a brilliant self-publicist who presented a Bambi-like image to the public and was always polite to journalists.

He would never be so unguarded as Gordon Brown who, when he became Prime Minister and was forced to have dinner with a lot of ambassadors he did not want to meet, talked of them as these 'f****** people'.

Yet Tony effed and blinded with the best of them behind closed doors and went ballistic when his will was thwarted. These qualities are not loveable, but they often go with the territory.

Indeed, I know whom I should prefer if forced to choose between a completely human politician who occasionally lost his or her rag, and someone like Robespierre - the mass-murderer and architect of France's reign of terror - who was ice-cold and never lost his temper.

By all means attack Gordon Brown if you think he has mismanaged the economy or the war in Afghanistan. But, quite candidly, if he has sometimes clenched his fist or fingered someone's lapel or used a few rude words, we should not care less.

The important question is, does he have what it takes to be Prime Minister? That is all we should care about.

History shows that in order to be a leader you need a hell of a lot of aggression. Brown, we now know, has that in spades.

But truly great leaders need more than aggression - they need honesty, conviction, principle, decisiveness and much more besides. And on the evidence so far, Brown appears to be sadly lacking in these essential qualities.

Perhaps that is the real reason, after all, his staff are not prepared to be shouted at.